eating less may delay human aging

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Study: eating less may delay human aging

 

Jan. 15, 2006Courtesy American College of Cardiologyand Life Technology News http://www.lifetechnology.org/blog/

 

A new study is the first to associate a low-calorie diet with delayed signs of aging in humans, its authors say.

 

The hearts of people who follow a low-calorie, yet nutritionally balanced, diet resemble those of younger people when examined by sophisticated ultrasound function tests, the study found. They also tend to have more desirable levels of some markers of inflammation and excessive fibrous tissue, it concluded.

 

The study appears in the Jan. 17 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

 

“Eating less, if it is a high-quality diet, will improve your health, delay aging, and increase your chance of living a long, healthy and happy life,†said Luigi Fontana of the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri and the Italian National Institute of Health in Rome, Italy.

 

“This is the first report ever to show that calorie restriction with optimal nutrition may delay primary aging in human beings.â€

 

Many studies have shown that animals can live longer when they eat fewer calories, but human study has been difficult. The caloric restriction model requires a strict diet regimen, both to keep the total number of calories low and to insure that participants consume the right balance of nutrients.

 

Rather than try to randomize volunteers to different diets and then hope that they will stick to them for years, the researchers compared 25 people who already had been following caloric restriction for an average of six years, consuming about 1,400 to 2,000 calories per day, with 25 similar control subjects who were eating typical Western diets, about 2,000 to 3,000 calories per day.

 

Hearts tend to stiffen and pump less effectively as people get older, but ultrasound examinations showed that the hearts of the people on caloric restriction appeared more elastic than those of the control subjects; that is, the hearts relaxed between beats in a way that is similar to the hearts of younger people.

 

In addition, several heart disease risk factors and inflammatory markers were lower in the caloric restriction group than in the Western diet group.

 

Fontana, who designed and led the study, emphasized that caloric restriction does not mean simply eating less.

 

“Calorie restriction is associated with longevity only when is coupled with optimal nutrition. On the other hand, calorie restriction coupled with malnutrition accelerates aging and causes severe diseases. Therefore, eating half a hamburger, half a bag of French fries and half a can of soft drink is not healthy caloric restriction and is harmful,†he said.

 

“The caloric-restriction subjects ate a healthful balanced diet with at least 100 percent of the recommended daily intake of each nutrient, providing approximately 1,671 plus or minus 294 kilocalories per day. The average diet was 23 percent protein, 49 percent complex carbohydrates, and 28 percent fat, including 6 percent saturated fat. Daily salt intake was lower in the caloric-restriction group compared to the Western diet group.â€

 

Fontana said the diets of people on caloric restriction resemble the traditional Mediterranean diet, which is based on a wide variety of vegetables, olive oil, beans, whole grains, fish and fruit. The diet avoids refined and processed foods, soft drinks, desserts, free sugars, white bread and white pasta.

 

While many people could adopt some of these diet practices, Fontana cautioned that anyone attempting to follow a strict caloric-restriction diet should have expert guidance, because of the risk of malnourishment if the diet does not include the right amounts of key nutrients.

 

The authors noted that the study design had some limitations.

 

The “study design does not allow us to assign causation,†he said, because to do so, researchers would have to first assign volunteers randomly to one diet or the other, and later see its effects.

 

The lower levels of some inflammatory proteins may indicate that caloric restriction helps to reduce damage from chronic inflammation in the body, he added.

 

“It is well known that overweight and obese people have a low-grade chronic inflammatory state. This is due to the fact that hypertrophic [overgrown] fat cells chronically produce inflammatory molecules that are released in the blood stream.

 

This means that body tissues in overweight and obese subjects are chronically exposed to inflammatory stimuli. It is our hypothesis that this chronic inflammation causes chronic tissue damage and… accelerated tissue and organ hardening,†Fontana said.